


On The Infantilization Of Telepaths

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [86]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, Psi Corps, Telepath culture, The Corps is Mother and Father, The Real Telepath Resistance Was Us, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-10 21:30:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12920646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Who really "infantilizes" telepaths?What do telepaths really mean when they say "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father"?The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	On The Infantilization Of Telepaths

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

Sooner or later, someone's saying it: "The Corps infantilizes telepaths! They're never allowed to grow up!"

As I've discussed [in this post about history](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10292036), it was normals, not other telepaths, who "took away every right [telepaths] had," and it's these same normal-written laws (and the normal-written Psi Corps charter) that maintain the status quo. It's normals, not other telepaths, who deny telepaths any meaningful civic or political participation.

  * Telepaths cannot run for or hold political office - by Earth Alliance statute.
  * Telepaths can vote, but since they cannot elect any of their own representatives (and can only vote for normals in their geographic region), and telepaths make up only one in a thousand in the general population, their vote is essentially meaningless.
  * Telepaths cannot elect representatives internal to the Corps - by the Psi Corps charter (written by normals and imposed on telepaths, without their consent).
  * The Corps is run by a mundane director, appointed for life by the Senate - again, by the charter. He has absolute power in the Corps, not just over who holds what positions, but literally over who lives and dies. He wants you dead? You're dead. That's it. (No one has any such power over the life and death of normals - and the death penalty has been abolished by the EA, for normals, by the 2230s.) Telepaths can be exiled or killed by the director for any reason, or no reason, at all.



         **The Corps is controlled by normals (the director, and the Senate above him).**

They control the budget, they control who is placed in what positions, and anyone who doesn't please them is disposed of. Not because "telepaths do this to each other," or "would" do this to each other if they were out from under the boot of mundanes, or because "the Corps believes in this," but because **mundanes do this to telepaths**.

Under Director Vacit, there was more telepath control in the Corps, because was secretly a telepath himself. But when he died around 2202, the Corps passed over to complete normal control, as the Senate had all along intended. And Johnston went around swiftly killing and exiling everyone who posed any sort of threat to his absolute control, replacing them with people who were loyal only to him (telepaths who were willing to sell out their brethren for favor, or telepaths who complied under duress).

So, if someone means, by "the Corps infantilizes telepaths," that a handful of powerful mundanes, working on behalf of mundane society as a whole, use their control over the telepath population _via their control of the Corps_ , to "infantilize telepaths" and ensure that in perpetuity, telepaths have no right to meaningful democratic representation, internally or externally, then there's little debate.

If someone means, "the show presents telepaths as helpless victims who need to be rescued, and vilifies telepaths who don't kowtow to mundanes, who don't sit around waiting/begging to be rescued by powerful mundanes," then again, yes.

But there's a deeper misunderstanding that needs to be addressed, because it goes right the heart of the cross-cultural misunderstandings between normal society and telepath society.

When telepaths say "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is father," that is not "infantilizing" of telepaths - actually, exactly the opposite.

When normals formed the Corps out of the earlier MRA, they did desire a telepath population that would remain "infantilized," easy to control for their own (mundanes') benefit. But even generations prior to that, telepaths had been speaking of "kin and kith" as being more important than the desires of individuals, a collective identity that held more weight in people's lives than their individual circumstances. The longer telepaths lived under legal and social segregation and control, the stronger this collective identity became. Eventually, this collective "family" bond became in its own way a form of "resistance" to normal control. _We are stronger together - stronger than our oppressors._

It is no accident, then, that the show seeks to distort the meaning of this expression, since it stands as such a direct challenge to mundane control.

This is what Bester talks about in the trial scene (Final Reckoning, p. 243-244), when he says the following:

         "You made that [the conditions of the charter], each and every one of you. Oh, you might try to pawn it off on your ancestors, but you reified it each generation, gave it the nod. I spent the first seventy-two years of my life being told what a _good_ little boy I was, how _well_ I served humanity by hunting down my people. I have the commendations to prove it, a drawerful.

         "Now, suddenly, you've decided that maybe Psi Corps wasn't such a good idea, and you want to sweep it all under the rug. You want to pretend it just went bad, somehow, and that it was _my_ fault. You also know that isn't true.

         "You blame me for continuing to fight the war that started in 2115? You blame me for defending my people? I suppose you do. Psi Corps was developed to keep telepaths in their place. An act of war, of suppression. You want to know who the real telepathic Resistance was? It was _us_. Protecting ourselves against you. Sure, along the way we protected you, too, whether you knew it or not, and more than you will _ever_ know.

         "But in the end, all of us inside knew what was coming. [You would try to exterminate us all, and you expected us to sit there and take it, but we didn't. We fought back.]"

That bit about "along the way we protected you, more than you will ever know" refers primarily to the Corps' central role in defeating the Shadows, a role that was also erased from history, because it didn't fit with the narrative of "mundane heroes saving the galaxy," with maybe a few telepaths over there serving as their "weapons," under their control. (NOT WHAT HAPPENED.) It's no accident that aside from a few scattered lines, the Corps' role in defeating the Shadows was entirely omitted from the show. _They don't want you to know about it._

There is one line in  _Shadow Dancing_ ("Well, we're working with Bester now, and that was unexpected") - this appears to refer to the scene with Bester on the White Star in _Ship of Tears_ , but says nothing more about this "working with" consisted of. Then there's Bester's comment in  _Dust to Dust_ ("My blood is the same color as yours. And what I do, I do to protect Earth, same as you. You don't like how I do it, that's your prerogative. But there are things going on out there that you know nothing about, threats to the human race that no one ever hears about because we stop them. There's dangers all around us. And whether you like us or not, we may be all that stands between you and the abyss").

(If the Corps didn't play such a role in defeating the Shadows, even before the others knew about it, then what "threats to the human race" is he talking about, anyway? What other threats uniquely need a telepath military response, to save humanity? Oh right, _none_.)

There seems to be a line or two about this in Final Reckoning as well, also provided with no context, because again... they don't want you to know about it.

And when I say the Corps played this key role, I don't mean in the sense of the leadership doing so - no, Director York, just like Johnston before him, was working for the Shadows as part of the whole, larger conspiracy that had taken hold in all parts of EarthGov (mundanes). It was Bester's people, and other loyal telepaths, who were defying the director and standing up to it, even apparently engaging the Shadows directly.

In secrecy, even from the Corps itself.

Given this background, and the true meaning of the expression as a statement of telepath resistance, it is to be expected that the show would have you believe that "the Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father" instead means something nefarious, like "Big Brother is Watching You" - that certain "bad" telepaths are somehow the "real oppressors" of their population, and the rest are helpless little infantilized victims in need of rescue. As happens throughout canon, they flip things around 180 degrees to fit their narrative. Normals are scared of this expression because they know, deep down inside, that to many telepaths, especially those born in the Corps, it's an expression of telepath solidarity and power in the face of normal control - that this expression really means (among other things), "TO HELL WITH YOU, NORMALS - ONE DAY, WE'LL GET BACK THE RIGHTS YOU STOLE FROM US. YOU'VE GOT IT COMING."

The Corps is Mother and Father - _not you_.

\-----

Telepath society places high value on community, cooperation, interconnectedness and mutual accountability. This is what I described in [Andy's second story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10413966/chapters/22996560), in the scene with the student art installation:

         "He learned to avert his eyes as he passed the art installations, massive works that hung in all the common rooms of the dorms. Even looking at the projects now made his heart skip, especially in the dark of night. If he stopped to stare, to ponder, a quiet, cold terror seized him, and he could almost hear the paint, glue, and ripped paper whispering silently in the moonlight that he would never be able to go home to his family, back to the normal world, not even when he graduated at nineteen – never.

         "Somehow, since arriving at school, he had absorbed the deeper meaning of the artwork, as if through telepathic osmosis. _Family._ The ripped paper represented violence, he now knew – out in the wider world, telepaths were attacked regularly by normals, often for no reason at all.[](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10413966/chapters/23010558#_ftn1) The glue stood for healing – imperfect, messy – and the empty gloves honored telepaths who had been murdered, or killed in the line of duty protecting the Corps. All the remaining shapes in the figure were interconnected, overlapping – none could be removed without tearing the ones around it, or cutting the string, if not unraveling the entire project itself. And the red border, he knew – the red paint stood for blood."

Telepath society sees itself as a family, with the Corps as the metaphorical "parents" of all telepaths. But "the Corps" (not the normals who control it) is also made up of each and every telepath in it, and so every telepath is both a "parent" and a "child" to the others. (Or at least, should be - I'm speaking in general terms here, about the ideal.) Some telepaths, because of their specific role in the society, do play more of the "parent" role than others (Psi Cop, administrators, and so on), at least they play certain "parts" of that role (disciplinarian, match-maker, etc.), and obviously, not everybody always lives up to the ideal, and sometimes people do make it more about "themselves" than it should be (sometimes harmlessly, sometimes with deadly consequences for others). But in the ideal sense, this is the way the communal "organism" is supposed to function. (And usually did, until things Went To Hell in the civil war.)

Although the graduation ritual of Cadre Prime was uniquely abusive (background discussed [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12665913), ritual discussed [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12680634)), the underlying message that the teachers are trying to convey to the students is not wrong.

The _Corps_ was mother and father - not any of the individuals in it. By reversing the roles of "parent" and "child" in that ritual, the teachers were attempting to convey to the students that in the Corps, we are _all_ parents to each other, and we are _all_ children of the Corps.

(Deadly Relations, p. 36)

         ""Cadre Prime. Telepaths born, and you have raised each other as much as we have raised you. When you move from here, from cadre dorms and into the academies - it will be different. You will live and work beside those who were raised as normals who realized their abilities later in life, who do not understand the Corps as you do. They say the words but do not understand in their hearts what it _is_ to be Corps. It is your special gift to be able to teach them that, to show them by the example of how you live, how you learn, how you work together and apart.

         "All of us - all of us who stand before you - we were once members of Cadre Prime. We are your mothers and fathers, we are your sisters and brothers. We stood before our elders as you now stand before us. We were frightened, humiliated, angry - as you are. And together, as you did, we took up the cry, threw off the yoke, became mothers and fathers ourselves. Then they revealed themselves to us, as we have to you.

         "Now it comes full circle. You were children. Now I say, you are not. You are us, and we are you.""

I don't think it's necessary to link this lesson to mutual _humiliation_ \- I think children can be taught the tight bonds of mutual accountability and responsibility without being paraded naked across school grounds and telepathically attacked (and then expected to telepathically attack their elders), but after his initial horror, Bester doesn't question it (either the message or how it was taught). He rationalizes it as necessary. And even though he never intended to question the Corps and its lessons (e.g. about not being selfish), it still takes him a little while to actually _understand_ the lessons - it takes him running away from school himself, getting a Psi Cop killed, and getting _shot in the chest_ before he learns his lesson. /sigh/ And even then he still doesn't "get it" right away (though he has finally learned it by graduation!).

(Bey's going, "I [swore to the director](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12106929) that I would look after the kid. First I'm gonna save his life... and then I'm gonna KILL HIM MYSELF!")

The ideal in the Corps is about mutual cooperation and accountability - some of this message gets lost because the book focuses on Bester, who has so much trouble working with others, and prefers to be respected and feared rather than liked. He succeeded as a Psi Cop, but he spent much of life at odds with the smooth functioning of his peer group socially, driving away friends for one reason or another. (While the Corps values interconnectedness, helping each other, and making sacrifices for your friends and family, he takes the attitude of "My role is to save them all, even if they all hate me.")

A better example of the social values of the Corps, ironically, would be Mr. Bey, whose story is more backgrounded in the book, but who was loved by _everyone_ , and was no less effective a Psi Cop. He does his best to teach Bester these lessons, but much of that progress in getting Bester to socialize "normally" within the Corps falls apart - irreversibly - upon his death. Nonetheless, because the book does focus on someone raised in the Corps, the social values are all discussed or shown in the book, somewhere, even if the point of view character doesn't always - or can't, at times - understand them or internalize them as others do.


End file.
